Over the last two years I have evolved to the point of view that Adobe Lightroom is the primary photo-editing software for real estate photography. Forget Aperture. In versions 4 and 5 Lightroom has moved significantly ahead of Aperture for the things that are important to real estate photographers. Apple is just not paying enough attention to keeping Aperture up with Lightroom. Specifically, for real estate photo-editing:

Lens correction – The new improvements in the lens correction panel in LR 5 are a huge time savings for real estate work.

Highlight/Shadow sliders – The improvements in LR 4 are a must-have for real estate photography.

It’s now to the point that the only real estate related function that Lightroom can’t do is sky replacement and most real estate photographers can live without that feature.

After seeing a demonstration of OnOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 8 at Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom workshop last week and how it works as a Lightroom plugin I’ve come to believe real estate photographers will soon be able to get by without Photoshop very soon. Stay tuned for more details on this.

Second that Larry: Victoria’s site is a great Lightroom resource : being in touch with Adobe, she is always up on the latest refinements (and fixes when new versions are released) and the forum on her site has some very useful contributions. Please keep us posted re the On One plugin!

I come across photographers all the time still who just use photoshop or bridge and I think they are missing out. One of the teachers that greatly helped me hone my skills is Chris Orwig of the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. I took every class possible of his on Lynda.com about 5 years ago and his courses took me from getting by to being proficient in all aspects of post processing. There are many other courses one can take on Lynda.com but Chris’s are some of the best. Here is a link to his courses.

I’m going to have a look at this. I own Lightroom but have worked for so many years in Aperture that Lightroom is foreign to me. I use it only for my timelapse work as the workflow with LRTimelapse is great. I find the controls too restricting compared to Aperture. Hopefully this link will help thanks for the post Larry.